I was so tired when I woke up this morning. I didn't have time to go to the store yesteday so I had to buy breakfast. I discovered a nice cafe not far from the hotel, so I bought a cinnamon roll (which was filled with not just raisins, but various fruit - quite tasty) and a banana. It only cost 2.50 € (about $3.30). Quite reasonable I would say. I think I'll go there on Saturday morning before my flight, too. Work today was much better than yesterday. We changed how some processes work and it seems to be going more smoothly now.

There wasn't much new during the conference. I worked a few sessions. I had some time off (which is when I wrote the update for the previous few days) and that was about it. After the conference there was a banquet at a golf course not far away. It was very fancy (seriously, a 5 course meal and not traditional Spanish food at all - it was very upscale and fancy). The entertainment was a flamenco show - much better than the show we saw Wednesday night. At this show, there were 9 dancers (7 female, 2 male) and they used castanets and changed outfits a few times and overall just did a really fantastic job. I've decided flamenco dancing is like tap dancing except with more flair!

The tradition among the volunteers is to have a party on the night of the banquet. Before the banquet began, we went down to the volunteer room and enjoyed some snacks that each volunteer brought from their home country. Then we went to the banquet and after the banquet (around midnight) we hung out some more. Around 1am I decided it was time to retire so I left, but apparently everyone else stayed out until 3 or 4am! They are crazy! It seems that Spaniards are quite the party animals and it's fairly common for people to stay out until 5, 6, or 7am! Not me! I decided that tomorrow I would skip the morning session (I don't have any responsibilities during it, so it won't be a problem for me to sleep in extra and not arrive until 11am or so). Hopefully I'll get enough sleep!

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

Ay caramba!!!! What an awful, crazy day! So, until today, only about 60% of the conference attenders have been here, because the actual conference didn't start until today. There were a ton of people and lots of security - the entire building was sealed off except for the auditorium. So it was crazy until the Prince left. Then, the lunch crowd was insane - way too many people for the way the line was arranged. Eventually we figured out how to rearrange the line and it got easier, but it made life very stressful to me. The room I was assigned to turned out to not be very interesting for me, so that was annoying, too.

After the conference ended, there was a "reception". Last time I was at this conference that meant a dinner with good food and music, but this time it meant sitting in the auditorium and watching a hearing imparied flamenco dancer. At first I didn't think limited hearing would make the dancing that difficult, but at one point it took her awhile to find the right rhythm. She did a beautiful job once she got into it.

After the reception, there was an exclusive event hosted by Google at the Prado Museum (because they are partnering together to make the artwork in the Prado accessible on Google Earth at a very high resolution - 14 paintings are currently available). I was invited because I applied for the Google Travel Grant (so they could pay for part of my airplane ticket - although I was declined). They let me bring one guest, so I brought Karen. I'm glad I did because 1) she enjoyed it far more than I did and 2) she was a lot of fun to talk with. I really enjoy looking at statues more than paintings and we only got to tour the 14 paintings featured on Google Earth. However, the room where the reception was held after the tour contained 7 statues (supposed to be daughters of Apollo? or Zeus?) so that was cool. You aren't allowed to take photos in the museum, but we were able to take photos in that room, so I have one with me and the statues :)

We left around 11pm and walked to the metro. I watched a bit of tennis while I was getting ready for bed - I had to eat something because they've only been feeding us fingerfood!!! I'm tired of not having real food and can't wait to get home!


Well, that's it for now.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

This schedule is starting to wear me down. I awoke at 6:30am and was at the venue by 8:30am. The room I was assigned to for the day was actually very interesting (that doesn't happen very often). There was a challenge (similar to the NetFlix challenge, if you're familiar with that) the goal was to propose an algorithm to disambiguate people on the web (ie, if you're searching for "Michael Jackson" which one do you want - the singer? reporter? other?). It was fun hearing about the groups that participated and what they based their solutions on.

After the conference, we had to stay late to get a security briefing. The Prince of Astorias is coming to the Opening Ceremony tomorrow and there is a big production regarding his safety and all that. We didn't get our briefing until 7:30pm, so by the time we were done and got home it was already very late (after 9pm). I was too tired to do anything, so I ate dinner in the room. All of the other volunteers went to a RealMadrid game (the local soccer team). Tickets were $60 and I was very tired, so I didn't go. But I watched the 2nd half of the game on TV. It was actually a very exciting last 10 minutes and RealMadrid won in overtime! (well, it's technically not overtime, but penalty time... I'm not sure exactly what it's called, the direct translation from Spanish is "discount time" and since I'm not familiar enough with soccer in English I'm not sure what the equivalent is).

So, I went to bed after the soccer game ended, around 1am.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

I have a break and am at the conference using the public computers that have been set up for conference attendees to use. Even though I brought my laptop with me to Spain, it hasn't come in very handy because 1) I'm too lazy to carry it around and 2) the wireless internet at the hotel is too slow to use.

So, here's the latest update:

The conference officially started. As a volunteer, my responsibilities require a typical day to look something like the following... Get up at 7am, eat breakfast, get ready to go, ride the metro to the venue, and be there between 8:30 and 9am. Check in with my boss and hang out until the first session starts (between 9 and 9:30am, depending on the day). When the session starts I need to be in the room that I am assigned to for the day, ensuring that the presenter(s) is(are) comfortable and doesn't(don't) have any questions as well as count the attenders. After 90 minutes there is a coffee break for 30 minutes. During the coffee break I don't really have to do anything except answer questions and help people find what they need. Then the next session starts and my job is the same as during the first session (well, during all sessions I do the same thing). Then there's lunch, which can hardly be called a meal. It's a bunch of fingerfood and paella (and the locals say the paella really isn't that tasty). During half of lunch I stand at the entrance collecting lunch tickets and during the other half of lunch I get to "eat" (if you can call it that - it's really just glorified grazing). After lunch the schedule is the same as the morning.

At the end of the day, all of us volunteers check in with our boss and report the numbers for the day and debrief. In the evenings the schedule varies.

On Monday, in the evening my roommate (Karen, a great gal from Kansas, who has been volunteering for the last 9 years) and I and a few others decided we needed to go to a real grocery store to buy some food. The store also had a cafeteria, so we went there for dinner. I was ready for some familiar food, so I bought a small hamburger. It was good and filling. The time is all twisted around here. We eat lunch after 1pm, the conference doesn't end until 6pm, and by the time we're all done and back home we don't manage to eat dinner before 8pm. By the time we returned from the store and cafeteria, it was past 10pm. We finally got to bed around 11:30pm and were very tired.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

Today is Sunday. I awoke at 8:30am, got ready for church, packed my bags, and left with our friends to go to their church. The service was in Spanish and I understood about 80% of it until about half way through and I was just too tired to pay attention. Then I basically stopped trying and didn't understand more than 10%. I hit the wall. There's only so much Spanish my mind can handle on too little sleep. Then there was Sunday School. Also in Spanish, but the teacher spoke much more slowly (although with a thicker accent) and I understood about 70% of it (when I was trying). My friend dropped me off at the big conference hall where we will be meeting all week and I got to work helping with the setup. We took a break for lunch and continued with the setup for about 4 more hours. Then, everything was done and we had the evening to ourselves. We're basically all staying in the same hotel, so we rode the metro to the hotel together and checked in. My roomate is a great gal from Kansas. She's been coming to the WWW conferences for years, but I didn't meet her at the last one because there was a devastating hurricane in Kansas right before the conference. Several of us hung out for awhile and then went to a store to buy food for breakfast. I returned to the room for a light dinner and some time on the internet to write my update for the past few days. The internet wasn't working, so I just wrote the update so I can send it from the conference hall tomorrow. Now I'm ready for bed and it's barely 10pm. The week is looking up! Hopefully I'll be getting more sleep than I have for the past few days!

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

When talking with my friends last night, they mentioned that the young people from their church were going to take a day trip to Toledo. I was assured that while Madrid doesn't seem like a very Spanish city, in Toledo, you feel like you're in Spain. So I woke up at 8:20am so I could get ready and be at the church by 9:30. About 25 people from the church went. We car pooled down there (it's about an hour or hour and a half drive). When we drove up, we saw an amazing fortress which is the old town. It's a walled area of the city with really old looking buildings. I was so excited and assumed that we would park and I would get a chance to come back and explore and take photos, etc. That didn't happen, so that was a bit disappointing. We arrived and parked and regrouped. I assumed that we would break up into smaller groups, explore, and meet back at the cars at a specific time, but instead we all stuck together as a massive group. That arrangement had its benefits as well as its drawbacks. Main benefit: I could talk to all of the people in the group rather than just get to know the small group I ganged up with. Main drawback: it took forever to get anywhere and I couldn't explore the things I wanted to. For example, according to Rick Steves, the only really interesting thing in Toledo is the Cathedral (which is the first cathedral built in Spain). We walked to the outside of it, but didn't get a chance to go inside. As for the benefits, I met lots of great people. One gal is teaching English here. She's from LA and went to USC. One fellow knows four languages (including English and Russian - he's originally from St. Petersburg) so we talked a bit. There were three other Russian speakers who were originally from Ukraine. We talked a lot in Russian - two of them hardly speak any Spanish at all even though they have lived here for 6 months. About 5 of the people spoke English well enough for them to converse with me in English and the rest was in Spanish. Unfortunately, talking in Russian completely confused me so it made it very difficult to think of Spanish words when I wanted to talk, so I didn't do much talking in Spanish. Who knew that I would come to Spain to practice my Russian? It's actually a good thing, because in a few days Ivan's dad is coming to NYC to visit us and he'll be there when I get back. I was concerned about switching immediately from Spanish to Russian, but now it's like no switch at all. I'll just keep talking in English and Russian!

Back to the recap of my day: we returned from Toledo very late. I had a quick snack and went on the computer to write my recap, but then remembered that tomorrow is my last day with our friends and I wanted to try to transfer their e-mail contact list from one computer to another, so I did that instead. In the process, I managed to break a few things (now an error message pops up if they click on a certain folder). Eventually I discovered that the problem is one computer has Outlook 2003 and the other has Outlook Express 2002. And they are not compatible. I finally found a website explaining what I needed to do and in the end got it working, but then it was 1:30am. I was exhausted and decided not to write the recap and instead went to bed.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

I decided to do my best to overcome jet lag and set my alarm for 9am. Wow! I thought my alarm clock at home gave me a heart-attack! This one is much worse! I won't be sleeping through that! I opened the blinds to let the sun in so that I would wake up better and ended up getting out of bed at 9:20. I was a slow-poke and dawdled around the house until 11:30am. I opted to skip out on the family meal at noon because it wouldn't allow for much sight-seeing time for the day.

I decided to start out with the Rick Steves' Walking Tour of Madrid. We did his walking tour of Berlin when we were in Germany and it was great. This one was rather mediocre. I'm not sure if that means that Madrid is a mediocre city or if Rick just didn't do a good job. I'm inclined to think the former. From what I hear, Barcelona is really the more popular tourist destination anyways. I started at Puerta del Sol. There's construction there, so I didn't even realized that I had arrived. I took a picture of 0 km - the place where every distance in Madrid is measured from. That and the Palace, which is where the tour ended. There wasn't really much interesting in between. So at the Palace I decided to buy a ticket for the tour. Since I got the student discount (thank you, UCLA) I splurged on the audioguide, which was totally worthwhile. I learned in Russia that it's really helpful to get the auidioguide in English and I wasn't disappointed this time. Relatively little of interest in the palace is translated into English, so without that guide it would have been a pretty boring visit of 20+ rooms.

Time goes by so quickly here and I'm not using a watch so I had no idea that it was almost 7pm by the time I was done and leaving the Palace (during the walking tour I had stopped to eat some sandwiches and fruit that I had packed for myself, but I was getting a bit hungry by then). I took the metro home and was back by 8pm. I visited with the friends I'm staying with for awhile, ate dinner, and went to bed around 11:30pm.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009

Here I am. Safe and sound. In Madrid, Spain.

My flight left Newark airport at 10:30pm (delayed by half an hour thanks to mechanical difficulties). I must say, as far as international travel is concerned, it was one of my best trips (it helped that it was only 7 hours of flying rather than 9, but also the timing was phenomenal). As soon as we took off, they started serving hot dinner (I had a very delicious chicken and pasta dish with salad, roll, and brownie) and then they served drinks. Each seat had a personal screen on which you could play music, movies, tv shows, games, etc. After dinner I watched a movie and then went to sleep for the night. I usually have a horrible crink in my neck after sleeping on an airplane, but before leaving NY I picked up one of those inflatable neck pillows and it was great. I slept soundly until they woke us up for breakfast. It was mixed fruit and a croissant. And then they brought drinks. And we were on the ground within an hour. We landed at noon on Thursday. I was semi-rested, fed, and ready to face the day. I couldn't have asked for better timing.

I had intended to read the tour book of Madrid on the plane, but I watched a movie instead, so after our friends (I'm staying with missionaries from our church in CA until Sunday) picked me up from the airport we went home and I took some time to plan out where I wanted to sightsee. We ate "dinner" (they have their big meal of the day at 2pm) and I did some more planning (struggling at times to stay awake, but I did!). Eventually I set out around 5pm. I decided to do some shopping rather than real sightseeing, but I did manage to see the bull fighting arena (bull fights are on Sunday, so I won't be going to one). I took the metro to the arena. Took photos. Shopped. And then took the metro closer to the center of Madrid and walked around a lot looking for stores that I thought would be good candidates for souvineer shopping (hoping to avoid the souvineer shops in Plaza Mayor, where the crush of tourists - and pick pockets - are more likely to hang out). However, those shops weren't as promising as I had hoped, so I'll go to Plaza Mayor today (and do the Rick Steves' Walking Tour of Madrid).

I came home at 8pm and was ready to fall over. My shoulders ached because I brought too much stuff with me on my walk-about. My knee ached because that's what it does. And my feet ached (I guess I'm not used to walking). I came home and ate yummy, homemade chicken soup, and saw Ivan was online so I chatted with him for awhile. I eventually went to sleep around 10:30pm.

My initial thoughts about Spain: Most people start their day late, have a huge late lunch, take a siesta, and go to bed super late. I need lots of sleep, so all of that sounds good except the staying up super late part. The metro system is fairly recently built, so it's very clean and modern. During rush hour, the metro is almost as crowded as Russia, but somehow it seems as if you can't squeeze another person on, but they do and still manage to not touch each other. Very different from Russia where you're pushed into other people and squeezed together so tightly. Also different from DC where if it looks like another person won't fit then they don't even try getting on. A beautiful "invention" they have here (actually, I've seen it in several European countries) are these wonderful blinds that are installed outside your window that can be pulled down and literally black out your room. My sister needs to get these installed at her house so she can sleep during the day after an over-night shift. They are incredible. They also help eliminate ambient noise from the street. The elevators here are very small. They say the capacity is 5 people, but I don't know how you could fit more than 3 in there. There seems to be no such thing as an obese Madrileno (person from Madrid). In my walk-about yesterday I didn't even see someone I would call fat, much less obese. Perhaps it's because 1. no fast food (it's being slowly introduced, but the locals only go there as a novelty - most people eat home-cooked meals) and 2. their big meal is earlier in the day, providing lots of time to work off those calories. That's about all of my thoughts for now. The weather is very similar to NYC right now. Bright and sunny outside (although it rained yesterday) but still very brisk and downright cold - especially when the wind blows.

My volunteer responsibilities for the conference begin on Sunday, so after Saturday I probably won't have as much time to dilly-dally on the internet, but until then I intend to send you regular updates. Partly so you can keep up with my goings-on and partly so I can easly copy and paste these e-mails into blog postings (I don't like to blog about trips until I'm back from them, just so the crazies out there don't know I'm gone).

If you think of it, you can pray for Alberto, one of the men in the church here who had a kidney transplant last week. At first his response looked favorable, but then his body started rejecting it. It's still too soon to tell what will happen, but we're praying that his body would accept it and that his doctors would have wisdom and we're praising God for Alberto's confidence in Him during this difficult and painful time (his body is all swollen and he's on cortisone for the pain).

That's it for now.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009